Marya Morevna lay down on the frozen floor of the house on Dzerzhinskaya Street, the house on Gorokhovaya Street. Zvonok crept into the crook of her neck, near her ear, where the blood flows so close to the skin, where warmth stays when it is gone from everywhere else. She kissed her there, and held her arms wide to embrace the whole of Marya’s face.
“Where were you?” the domovaya whispered. “Where did you go?”
And then she vanished, arms outspread, melting away like vapor.
Marya stood up, her mind expecting her Yaichkan body to respond, young and full and strong. But her Leningrad body answered, creaking, wizened, brittle. She limped to the bed, not wanting to see what lay beneath the frosted covers, to pull back the blankets and find herself too late for anything, useless to both her husbands, in the end.
“Ivanushka, are you alive? Are you awake?”
From under the linens, a moan, tapering into a rattling breath, then a cough. “Leave me alone, Zvonok. Don’t, not today. Don’t pretend to be her.”
“It is me, Ivanushka, it is me. Come out; look.”
A hand rose out of the bed: blackened around the fingernails, fingers shrunken into claws with huge knuckles, grey as the frost. It could not be Ivan’s, not Ivan, always so warm, always so big. His eyes peered up at her, sunken and old, the same starveling, feral flame in them that the domovaya had. He was so thin, so thin she could not imagine how he still lived. But somehow, Marya Morevna felt that she saw him naked for the first time, the intimacy of his bones showing through his skin, his helplessness. He was beautiful, still. She felt as though she looked at him from a long way off, through a telescope, at the bottom of a well. Bounce up, she thought. Bounce up and become Ivan again.
“Oh,” he rasped, “oh.”
“I do not know if I ought to say I am sorry,” Marya said, putting her hand gingerly on his head, on his matted hair. “It seems too small a thing to say.”
“I will say it,” Ivan whispered. “I was harsh with you. You did not make me a criminal. I should not have said such a thing. In fact, when I forged our wedding certificate, I was so happy to write your name beside mine, so happy to hold in my hands evidence of us, something to carry between us, this falsified document which told the truth even while it lied. I’m sorry, Masha. I should not have said half again the things I said.”
“Hush, Ivanushka. It doesn’t matter.” It didn’t. She had said cruel things in both her marriages. She had never begrudged him his share of barbed words. Marya lifted him into her arms—he weighed so little, so little, and if her muscles were shrunken and battered, still they remembered Yaichka, still they remembered being strong. In her grey arms she wrapped her grey boy, and the snow fell outside without sound, and no one talked on the streets or played guitars, and no one came to any door looking for any girl in any window. Leningrad lay so empty, as empty as an old bed.
“Masha, do you know, I tried so hard to find you!” Ivan coughed, and Marya wiped his mouth a little, but her hand only opened up the pink sores there.
“Don’t speak, my love. Talking isn’t worth the strain.” And I cannot bear to hear how loyal you were. Do not tell me.
Ivan rasped; his throat rattled like stones in a jar. “Talking is the only thing I can do! I cannot take you in my arms, or kiss you, or make love to you as one should to a wife who has returned after a long journey. I cannot make you understand that I forgive you, that I know you loved both he and I, the way a mother can love two sons. And no one should be judged for loving more than they ought, only for loving not enough, which was my crime. After all, I took you from him to begin with, so I cannot begrudge him taking you from me—” Marya Morevna tried to protest, to absolve him or herself or both. But he looked at her with eyes leached of color and tried to lift his hand to hush her. “Oh, don’t interrupt, Masha! If I stop I shall never start again. I know I did not take you and he did not take you. I thought that for a long while, but you chose me, and then you chose him, and choosing is hard—one choice is never the end of the story. Gamayun told me this was all a story, and I had to be sure to love you, or else it would not work out as it should. He needn’t have worried: In the space of one heartbeat to another I loved you and I was lost to you, like one of those dead soldiers made of cloth. And I have had such a long time to think about it, Marya! Such a long time to lie in the basement in the ropes that held him and wish that they had held me, because that would have meant you wanted me enough to keep me secret, the way I wanted you, and kept you secret.” Ivan rested his ashen hand on her arm. It was so dry, so light. She could feel his bones, as she had once felt Koschei’s bones beneath his skin. “But do you know, after you disappeared—I had forgotten you could do that—and after they cut the rations again, and then again, I thought, Why did she stay so long? And that was comforting, because you must have stayed for me. Don’t answer. I don’t want to be corrected. But do you know, I looked for you? All over the city, over thrice nine districts, thrice nine prospekts. I asked everyone for news of you. I went to Maklin Prospekt, to Decembrists Street, where that house you liked used to stand, the one with all the paintings on it? It burned down, did you know?”
“Yes, I knew.”
“Zvonok cried when she saw it. But I went to that house and I saw bits of the paintings in the rubble: golden like a girl’s hair, like chicken legs; and red like a firebird; and green, where the coat of Ivan the Fool once was. And I laughed because of course I am Ivan the Fool, of course I am. Only a fool is so innocent as to think he can measure up to a woman’s first love, can measure up to deathless. You know, it’s like when the Tsar was killed. I think maybe Russia had two husbands, too, and one was rich and one was poor, one old and one young, and the poor husband shot the rich husband in the chest, and all his daughters, too. He was braver than I am.”
Ivan shut his eyes. His brow furrowed as though he might like to cry, but had no strength for it. “I went to the house on Decembrists Street, and I saw a rook in the ruins, just as black as if he’d been burnt himself. I looked at the rook and he looked at me, and I thought I had never seen such a big bird, so fat, such a sheen on him, like a duke among rooks. Even before we ate all the birds we could shoot, I had never seen one with such a sharp glance for me. My stomach said, I’ll have that bird. But my heart said, There are few enough fat and beautiful things left in this city. And you were not there, not in the rubble, not in the snow. I walked home, but as I walked the rook followed me, hopping from stoop to stoop, flying down the dead power lines, his sharp glance bouncing off the roof tiles and down and down to me. When I turned back onto Dzerzhinskaya Street and touched the door of our own house, the rook flapped his wings and spoke to me from the branch of the cherry tree.
“‘Give me something of hers,’ he squawked. ‘And I will help you.’
“All I could think of was the red dress I bought you so long ago. It hung in the closet; it still held your shape. I pressed my face into it, but your smell had gone. I fed it, inch by inch, out the window, and the rook took it with his curved beak.